Maliki Pushes for Election Gains, Despite Fears

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq is trying to reassure Iraqis that he will respect local interests.

ALISSA J. RUBIN

JANAJUH, Iraq — Few have as much to gain or lose from the provincial elections on Saturday as Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, whose party is battling rivals across Iraq.

From palm grove-sheltered villages, like his hometown here in southern Iraq, to the crowded streets of Baghdad, Iraqis will cast votes that will strongly signal how much power Mr. Maliki, an increasingly authoritarian leader, will be able to command. Either the vote will strengthen his party at the local level or it will bolster his rivals, who want to keep more power in the provinces.

For now, Mr. Maliki is trying to reassure Iraqis that while he will be a strong leader, he will also respect local interests. At a gathering of thousands of tribal leaders in Karbala recently, he said, “The iron centralization has ended,” and added that the country would have federalism, a term used here to mean provincial power.

Many Iraqi politicians — even some onetime allies — do not believe him. They fear a return to the sway of a single leader, arbitrary and bloodthirsty, with power concentrated in Baghdad.

“That’s why there is a crisis of confidence now; it might not be realistic, but a person who has been bitten by a snake is afraid every time he sees a rope,” said Hadi al-Ameri, a leader of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, one of the largest Shiite parties and one that in the last election ran in a coalition with Mr. Maliki’s Dawa Party.

Mr. Maliki’s critics have been rattled by his efforts to control the armed forces more directly, a reminder of the days when Saddam Hussein personally controlled a number of special security forces loyal only to him. Mr. Maliki has reshuffled military commanders and created two handpicked military forces that report primarily to him as the commander in chief rather than to the Interior or Defense Ministries.

He has also created tribal councils across the country that are directly linked to his office, which critics fear are stalking-horses to extend the reach of the Dawa Party and make gains in the provincial elections at the expense of his rivals. The councils are often financed by the government and organized by local Dawa members.

Mr. Maliki’s actions seem prompted by fears of another sort, ones born of his history as a dissident and exile: that the outlawed Baath Party he fought for so many years will regroup and oust him, particularly as the American forces that have supported him begin to withdraw.

“If Bush and Obama were to suddenly leave, then Baathist officers would surround the Green Zone and kill all the leaders,” said Mohammed Ridha al-Numani, a Shiite cleric who has known Mr. Maliki since they lived in Iran in exile in the 1980s.

While that seems unlikely any time soon, such experiences of terror and embattlement have shaped the way Mr. Maliki governs. “His party, Dawa, had to operate secretly, in cells, like Communist parties in non-Communist countries; this makes a lot of sense for guerrilla warfare, but not for nation building,” said Joost Hiltermann, the director of the International Crisis Group’s Istanbul office and an expert on Iraq. “So you end up with a paranoid, very closed circle around you; no open debate. And in Iraq, you have to build a coalition government.”

The anger at Mr. Maliki from the political class is strong enough that he has twice narrowly missed being voted out of office, in December and in late 2007. Both efforts failed because his opponents could not agree on a replacement. And Mr. Maliki is gaining popularity. Recent polling suggests that he has the most favorable ratings of any Iraqi politician.

The Americans lobbied strongly against deposing Mr. Maliki primarily because stability, as much as democracy, has been their short-term goal and they feared a vacuum that would destabilize the fragile country.

“You have to remember what it was like in 2006 when Iraq was between prime ministers; there was no one in charge, there was sectarian killing, 60, 70 bodies a day and that was just in Baghdad,” said a senior American diplomat.

Few people inside or outside Iraq believe that Mr. Maliki will quickly accrue the kind of power that Mr. Hussein wielded. Checks are embedded in the new Iraqi system, including the fact that a prime minister cannot freely choose his own ministers. And the country has already agreed to devolve significant power to the provinces — although how that will work in practice remains ambiguous and fiercely contested.

But many fear backsliding. “Maliki thinks that more power in the center is better,” said Fuad Hussain, chief of staff to Massoud Barzani, the leader of the Iraqi Kurdistan region, who has often been at odds with Mr. Maliki. “The problem is two things: What is the limit of that power? Who decides the limit?”

Youth and Exile

The dirt streets and the crumbling brick houses of Janajuh, Mr. Maliki’s home village, are a reminder of how far he has come. Lying along a muddy irrigation canal between the southern cities of Karbala and Hilla, it has one relatively new building, a school, but everything else is simple brick weathered gray by the mud of winter and the dust of summer. The streets are barely wide enough to accommodate cars, and the traffic more often consists of women leading donkeys hauling hay and firewood.

Mr. Maliki was born in 1950, the son of a government employee and the grandson of a former education minister during the monarchy. By the time he was an adolescent he was bicycling along the gravel roads to Hindiya, the nearest town of any size, to go to school.

He joined the Dawa Party in college. At the time, the Islamist party, founded by an uncle of the anti-American cleric Moktada al-Sadr, was already largely underground. Mr. Hussein saw its religious philosophy and predominantly Shiite membership as a threat. In 1979, shortly after he seized power, Mr. Hussein ordered the arrests of all Dawa Party members nationwide. In Mr. Maliki’s home district alone, at least 70 men were detained; most were never seen again.

Mr. Maliki was one of fewer than five who escaped. He took refuge in Syria, moved to Iran and then returned to Syria, where he stayed until the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

While Shiite Islamist parties like Dawa are often accused of being close to Iran, Mr. Maliki saw the Iranians as neighbors but not always friends, his associates said. Dawa’s exiles were treated as “unwelcome guests” in Iran, said Sami Alaskary, a member of Parliament and a close friend of the prime minister.

He recalled one occasion when Mr. Maliki sought permission from the Iranians to send a Dawa operative across the border to Iraq. After Mr. Maliki had waited for weeks, an Iranian official called to say that the answer was ready but that Mr. Maliki needed to pick it up at the border office. It was winter and bitter cold, but he made the 14-hour drive there. When he arrived, the paper said: “Permission denied.”

“That person who called him to tell him the answer was ready, he knew it was a rejection but he didn’t tell him; he did it to humiliate him,” Mr. Alaskary said.

New Military Forces

The legacy of those years in exile is a deep distrust of all but those closest to him and the fear that rivals will gang up to unseat him.

Aiming, among other things, to ensure that that never happens, he created at least two military forces that report to him, the Baghdad Brigade and the elite Counterterrorism Task Force. The brigade will have about 3,000 members when fully staffed and is rigorously vetted to exclude those with sectarian or criminal agendas, Mr. Alaskary said. Details of the Counterterrorism Task Force are hazy. Members of Parliament have begun to protest publicly.

“The country is being militarized,” said Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish member of Parliament. “People think he has overreached.”

American military commanders privately defend Mr. Maliki, saying that he has had to exert control over security forces and that having forces loyal to him reduces the influence of Shiite and Kurdish militias that function within the security ministries.

The Baghdad Brigade works primarily to secure the Green Zone, but also supports the counterterrorism unit, which focuses on militias, kidnappings and gangs. Government officials in Diyala Province, northeast of Baghdad, have reported that people have been detained by armed men in unmarked sport utility vehicles who said they were from the prime minister’s office.

The Baghdad Brigade places detainees in a special holding area in the Green Zone. That is where Muntader al-Zaidi, the journalist who threw his shoes at President Bush, has been held. Family members assert that he was tortured there, though a spokesman for the Supreme Judicial Council said that an investigating judge found no physical evidence of torture.

Other parties accuse these military forces of detaining their members for political reasons. Ammar Wajih, a member of the Iraqi Islamic Party’s political leadership, said the senior Sunni member of the provincial council in Diyala, Hussain al-Zubaidi, had been detained since November.

“There is no evidence against him; we think this arrest is related to electoral politics,” Mr. Wajih said.

Fears are growing that these forces are not accountable to the broader Iraqi government. “What do they do? How do they decide who to go after? There’s no transparency,” said a senior official who works with the Presidency Council, which includes Iraq’s president and two vice presidents.

Mr. Maliki’s office has said that his position as commander in chief affords him wide latitude to take the steps necessary to protect the country.

Helping Tribal Councils

Dawa controls only one province, Karbala, and wants to gain seats, if not control, in several more. So Mr. Maliki is turning to the tribes for support, a tactic that Saddam Hussein used as well. The tribal councils have angered the Kurds as well as the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, which wants to maintain its grip on nearly every southern province. The Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq has an armed wing, as do the Kurds and the Sadr movement; Dawa does not.

A look at one southern province, Qadisiya, exposes the battle lines. The Supreme Council is vulnerable there. Many local residents are dissatisfied with services. The poor areas of the provincial capital, Diwaniya, are thick with trash, and in rural areas many school buildings are made of mud and lack even rudimentary plumbing and water. Mr. Maliki is popular because he has visited there and brought in reconstruction projects.

The tribal councils in Qadisiya, organized by a member of the Dawa Party, Fadil Mawat, receive $25,000 each to rent and furnish an office. There are 16 councils in this province alone. Each member may hire five or six people into the police force and give jobs to 20 others, Mr. Mawat said.

Giving tribes the means to hand out patronage positions increases their power and also makes them indebted to Mr. Maliki.

That is politics by the Maliki playbook.

“You know, we hear this criticism all the time, that he keeps only people from Dawa around him,” said his friend Mr. Alaskary. He added that while Mr. Maliki did have a smaller inner circle of close associates, he also had recruited many other advisers from different backgrounds.

“Condoleezza Rice came to Baghdad after he became prime minister, and she gave him some advice,” Mr. Alaskary said. “She said: ‘The people around you are very important. They have to have loyalty and be the people who you trust most.’ ”

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